Elizabeth Fearon

From 1997 to 2003, the photo-booth both produced my images and provided the conceptual framework informing those images. Initially, my photo-booth works were personal explorations of my movements, my face, and my body. The work moved from the personal to a way of thinking about social structures. From late 1999 to early 2000, I was no longer the subject of my work. Rather, the grid created through the photo-booth became increasingly significant as an anchor to both modernism and contemporary city planning. A grid can demarcate any natural surface. A grid can claim land. A grid can move people in very specific ways, through the structure of a city.

The juxtaposition of fleeting organic forms and the grid is meant to reference the people whose images and identities have been captured by the "official" use of a photo-booth; ie passports, identity cards; in hopes of subverting the medium and giving flux, flow and freedom, if only a visual breathing space.